13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

KÕIVA, Mare

E-publications in Folkloristics: problems and solutions

Freely accessible electronic publications in different fields have been online since the 1990s. During the past five years, several types of text corpora and e-publications have been accumulated in the field of folkloristics. In these five years the Internet environment has undergone significant changes: the userdom of this material has changed and widened, for example in addition to the US the number of requests from several European countries has increased, access from Asia and Africa is also growing; there are more requests for additional information, for permission to use material in research, etc. Electronic publishing and search engines allow us wider opportunities for using and distributing rare material. I would like to give an overview of the publications available: e-journals; virtual books; e-books or online editions of printed material; public databases and chosen text bodies, study materials, virtual exhibitions and miniportals.

E-publications are useful as they enable fast and multifaceted presentation of research results, creating an information field that is oriented towards several senses at a time. As is the case with most things, some problems concerning e-publications are more complex, some are simpler. The simpler questions, for example, are how to systematise the material and protect it with copyright. The more complex questions include determining target groups and their preferences, coherent pages, feedback and direct communication solutions, the needs of minority cultures versus those of majority cultures, and multilingualism. The main question is how to ‘imitate nature’ - how to present folklore and folkloristics in its multitude of genres, avoiding excessive centralisation, and how to preserve balance between large and complete text corpora and the enjoyable narratives of a tradition-carrier.